


Blessed Amongst Women

by xzombiexkittenx



Category: Christian Bible (Old Testament), Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Aziraphale is Bad at Feelings, Aziraphale wouldn't know his own feelings if someone pointed them out to him, Crowley's unending crisis of faith, Death Rituals, Female-Presenting Crowley (Good Omens), Gabriel would be a terrible choice for the annunciation, Good Person Crowley (Good Omens), Grief/Mourning, Ineffable Idiots (Good Omens), Scene: Crucifixion of Jesus 33 AD (Good Omens)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-07
Updated: 2020-02-07
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:20:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22604629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xzombiexkittenx/pseuds/xzombiexkittenx
Summary: And do not forget kindness to strangers, for by this, some who, while they were unaware, have entertained angels.Maryam, mother of the Son of God, buries her son with the help of a woman everyone says is a sorceress; has a crisis of faith; and curses an angel.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 30
Kudos: 221





	Blessed Amongst Women

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Благословенная среди женщин](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25614220) by [bfcure](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bfcure/pseuds/bfcure), [fandom Good Omens 2020 (team_Good_Omens)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/team_Good_Omens/pseuds/fandom%20Good%20Omens%202020)



> I’ve chosen to use the Hebrew versions of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus' names, because that’s what they would have been called at the time. 
> 
> Good Omens is based around the Christian mythology and plays fast and loose with history, so religious and historical accuracy wasn't my primary concern. However, I am depicting aspects of the Jewish faith and I am not Jewish. If anything I have written is offensive, please contact me.

**Golgotha 33 AD**

Maryam has seen the sorceress before. Who hasn’t? She arrived in Jerusalem less than a month ago and took up rooms. Her name is Crowley, just Crowley. No father’s name, or husband’s, or tribe.

Maryam did not consort with sorcerers, so she had never spoken to the woman, only heard her spoken of. It was an interesting bit of gossip, until Judah from Kriyot, whom her son loved, betrayed him. Yeshua was given to the Romans, and she had no more thought for idle gossip.

As for the motive? Maryam has heard Judah is Sicarii…was Sicarii. But she may never know because he is dead now, by his own hand. What arrogance to think one man could change history so profoundly. What idiocy to throw two lives away when, of course, Rome still occupies their land. What did he think would happen?

Now the sorceress has come to join the crowd at Golgotha. Her veil has slipped back and her long red hair moves and coils in the wind like a living thing. Her face is thin and unlovely, a strange heathen marking at the hinge of her jaw, and her eyes, her unholy eyes...Maryam will not look into them for fear of being cursed. But those terrifying eyes are turned up, and her mouth is turned down. She does not look like someone come to see a spectacle. There is a sorrow to her, sorrow vast and dark as the space between the stars, as she looks at Maryam’s son.

Her son, who dies quickly. At least he dies quickly.

Maryam is filled with bitter rage that she is grateful for that. She has to be thankful that he did not suffer for long. Maryam is blinded by her tears, she can’t seem to blink them away fast enough, so she barely sees it when a soldier sticks a spear in Yeshua’s side.

Oh, Yeshua. Her beautiful, loving, lovely boy. Her stupid, radical, determined son. Hers. Not Yosef’s, not the wheels of eyes, and light, and screaming that came to her one night, not the Almighty.

None of them know. Not even HaShem. How could they know what it’s like to grow something inside you? She thinks, sick with her rage, that the Rabbis are wrong, the Torah is wrong.

For You formed my inward parts;  
You wove me in my mother’s womb.  
I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made

How like a man to look at the garment he has been sold by another man and praise him, forgetting the cloth was made by his wife. It was in her body her son grew, in her blood he was born, in her arms and at her breast that he was carried. And now he is dead and Maryam will never see him smile or laugh again. He will never look at her with his solemn eyes as he says things strange and profound. She will never hear his terrible singing, or bake him bread, or kiss a scraped knee.

Yosef tries to bring her back to their home, but she sits on the scrub and dirt and will not go. She strikes at his head and shoulders when he tries to move her away. There is only one last thing she can do for her son now, and her heart is broken, but she will do it.

"They will not allow it," Yosef says. He is a practical man. She does love him, after everything. He is steady, and kind, and never had much to say about how it all began. He is a good man.

Maryam sends him away, and he goes, with a promise to return before sundown, because he loves her in return, and listens to her more than most men listen to their wives. She doesn’t want him to stay, because she doesn’t want him to see her grovel.

"Please," she says to a soldier, after Yosef has gone.

"Away, woman," the caligatus says.

Maryam kneels in supplication at the feet of the man who nailed her son to a cross. She clasps his knees. She would remove her veil and wash his feet with her tears and hair if she thought it would make any difference.

"Please, let me bury my son according to our faith."

She means: please don’t leave him up there. I can’t watch him go unwashed, uncovered, unburied. Please don’t make me stay out here chasing away the birds come to scavenge his flesh, don’t make me watch him rot in the sun.

He pushes her away, and she is weeping again, but they are tears of anger. There is a stone under her palm and she grips it tightly. She wants to throw it. She wants to scream. She wants her voice to bring down walls and kill her enemies. Her son. Her son is dead.

A hand comes down on her shoulder and grips her, too tight. Maryam looks up. The sorceress is standing over her, taller than the caligatus, and she has her abaya drawn closely around her, her shayla pulled low. Maryam thinks she wears the veil to hide her eyes, and not because she is modest.

"Let the woman have him," Crowley says, in reasonable tones.

Maryam lets go of the rock and Crowley’s grip loosens, a steadying touch now, not a warning.

"Remove yourselves or be removed," the soldier says. "This criminal will remain to serve as a warning, as all criminals do. Consider it a mercy that I do not have you beaten."

"Mercy," says the sorceress, low and mocking. "What a concept."

The caligatus takes a threatening step forwards, but the rising wind snatches at Crowley’s shayla and it falls away. The soldier does not move any closer to her, caught, still as a mouse before a cat.

Crowley smiles at him. It is not a smile. It is the way an animal bares its fangs before it strikes. "Let’s not get into who deserves mercy or forgivenessss, and who doesn’t," the sorceress continues. "No one wants to dredge up that old argument. Anyway, it’s just a corpse. What do you want with a manky old corpse?"

The soldier is afraid of her. Even the might of Rome and the Imperial army behind him is nothing in the face of a woman with the eyes of a serpent and hair the colour of fresh blood and fire. He flinches when she leans towards him.

"Give her the body," Crowley says. "There’s a good lad."

The caligatus has Yeshua brought down. The ropes are untied, the nails dug out of the wood and Maryam can hold her son in her arms again. She holds him in her lap as she gently works the crown of thorns away from his head. Her hands bleed, but what does that matter? She bled bringing him into the world.

The sorceress is still there. She cornered the caligatus again and now she's watching—more like overseeing—him break the legs of the crucified thieves. A brutal mercy.

Maryam is gently wiping away the dried blood from Yeshua’s forehead when Yohanan ben Zavdi tries to take the body from her. "He didn’t want this for you," he says. "Let us have the Rabbi. Go home, be with your husband."

"Haven’t you done enough?" Maryam says. "All of you. Leave me be."

"Might as well do what she says," Crowley says, returning to Maryam’s side.

Yohanan also flinches back when he sees her eyes. He spits three times to ward off ayin ha’ra.

"Away, shedim," Yohanan says. "In the name of the Lord Almighty, be gone!"

Crowley doesn’t look impressed. "Right," she says and snaps her fingers at him. "That’s enough of that. Go get your little pals and piss off."

Yohanan, like a man compelled, does as he is told.

The sorceress squats down next to Maryam. "You will need someone to help carry him though," she says. "You can’t just sit here."

"Will you help me?" Maryam asks. She doesn’t know why she asks.

Crowley blinks. It might be the first time Maryam has seen her blink. Then she says, "Sure, why not, nothing else on for the day." She calls out to a carter who has stopped on the road to gawk up at the dying thieves. "Oi, you with the barrow, give us a hand."

Crowley helps her lift Yeshua onto the cart. She is stronger than her slight frame should allow for, bearing most of Yeshua's weight. Maryam pushes the barrow towards the town herself. The road is uneven and she is tired already, but this is her task, her burden, and she will not ask Crowley to carry it for her. She will not ask why a man would hand over his cart without complaint, but then, Crowley is a sorceress.

Crowley ambles along next to the cart. She walks very strangely, hips going in the oddest of directions, seemingly unrelated to what the rest of her body is doing. Perhaps she has a defect of the bone as well as the eye.

"Did you know my son?" Maryam asks.

"We talked, once or twice," Crowley says. "He spoke highly of you. Well brought-up young man. Dead-set on his path...er...you know." She considers for a moment. "Brave."

Maryam has to swallow her scream again.

"Best to let it out," Crowley says, but Maryam grits her teeth, and shakes her head. She is hollowed out around her grief, the scream is the only thing keeping her going. If she lets it out, she won’t be able to finish this.

Crowley doesn’t press her, just continues weaving her way along the path. She doesn’t ask which way to go, and Maryam doesn’t bother to tell her, just puts her head down and pushes the cart.

Eventually, Maryam brings her son home for the last time. Yosef is not there. Likely he is in his shop, working through his grief. Maryam does not think to get him. She won’t call on the burial society either. She won't go to the temple that betrayed her family. This is enough: her and a stranger to lift her son out of the cart and lay him down for preparation.

Crowley looks around at Maryam’s modest little home with great interest before saying, "Look, is all this necessary? The washing, the whole song and dance…It doesn’t make any difference to the Almighty."

Maryam removes her veil and rolls up her sleeves. "I will not let Yeshua go to his rest dirty and unloved. The Almighty can do what he wants, I will take care of my son."

"Can’t argue with that," Crowley says. "I’ll get the water then."

She comes back moments later with three buckets. One in each hand, one on her head. How it balances with the way she walks, Maryam is not sure. She is sure that she didn’t have three buckets of that size, nor was the well so close. Again, she does not ask.

Crowley too rolls up her sleeves and wets the cloth Maryam gives her. Together they wash the body. Crowley’s hands are gentle, and she hums to herself as she works.

"What song is that?" Maryam asks. It sounds familiar, something she knows in her bones.

"Hm? Oh.: Crowley stills. It’s hard to tell what she’s thinking, but Maryam thinks she looks a little wistful, a little sad. "The first lullaby I ever heard. The first lullaby anyone ever heard, come to think of it. What's next?"

Maryam walks them through the purification and wrapping of the body. Crowley, in turn, tells her about the woman who first sang that lullaby; her bottomless curiosity, her ingenuity and bravery. How she bore two sons, and then lost both in very different ways.

"I can't keep track of how many children have been lost," Crowley says and then sticks her tongue out like the word is foul in her mouth. "Ugh. Lost. Like someone misplaced them. Bollocks to that. Anyway, I’m sorry for what they did to you."

It doesn’t sound like she means ‘they, the Romans,’ but Maryam doesn’t know who else she can blame.

"They do know," Crowley says.

"What?" Maryam looks up over Yeshua’s body.

Crowley points one spindly finger upwards. " _They_ know what it’s like to spin out worlds and stars and things that love you. Of course they know. They’re everyone’s mother. That’s what makes this all the more rotten."

Maryam finishes securing the shroud. "Not father?"

Crowley does something that Maryam thinks is supposed to be a shrug, but a shrug as performed by someone for whom having shoulders is a new experience. "Well…" she drawls. "Gender is a human thing, really. But they’re not a man, if you’re wondering."

"I wasn’t," Maryam says, because the only thing she knows for sure is that there are creatures in the world terrible and awesome enough to consider angels. What does it matter who they serve?

And then they are done, and Yeshua is still dead.

Maryam presses her lips together but the howl rising in her is too great. It pushes past her teeth and leaks out of her in a low moan, like wind across the mouth of a cave. She is crying, despite herself. She can’t cry yet. She isn’t done.

"Oh, Maryam, daughter of daughters," Crowley says, her stark, unlovely face a mirror of Maryam's sorrow. 

Crowley takes Maryam in her arms and they sink to the floor as Maryam begins to sob.

What seems like hours later, Maryam has quieted. She thinks she might have slept for a while, cradled against Crowley’s skinny body. Nothing about Crowley would indicate that she has borne children of her own, but Maryam knows better. Whoever Crowley is, whatever she is, she has brought things into this world that were taken. It’s there, in the downturn of her mouth, and the pinch between her eyebrows. She isn’t just sympathetic to Maryam, she knows.

Crowley stands, and helps her to her feet. Maryam’s knees crack and her back hurts but Crowley is as steady and sturdy as ever.

"Now what?" Crowley says.

There is a tomb for Yosef’s kin. A place where she and her husband will be placed. She thought Yeshua would be the one to sit shiva for them.

"Just a little further," Maryam says, putting her veil on and fastening her sandals. "Before the Sabbath; we’ll put him to rest before the Sabbath."

And Crowley, without complaint, helps her carry Yeshua away from the house. They should get Yosef. He should be there for his...For the child he raised. Maryam doesn’t stop.

She and a stranger carry her son to the tomb and set him gently down.

Once Yeshua is interred, Crowley says, "Afraid I’ve got to go before someone notices. Can’t let word get out about this sort of thing, so just...never mention this." She pulls her shayla up over her head. "You take care of yourself. Don’t let anyone—" she looks up, "— _anyone_ tell you what to do."

Crowley tugs the shayla lower in the front, to hide her eyes, and walks away; her strange, meandering gait taking her down the path. Maryam is sorry to see her go. Crowley may or may not be a sorceress, or shedim, or something else altogether. Crowley could simply be a mortal woman with a disease of the eye, although Maryam doubts it. Crowley could be a lot of things but, most importantly, she was kind to Maryam when she did not have to be.

Maryam sits for a while with Yeshua's body until she is ready to leave him. No, not ready, but able. She takes a deep, steadying breath and she still feels shaky and exhausted, but less alone. There have been generations of loss. It is written into the history of the world. She is angry, and full of sorrow, but she is not alone. Maryam leaves the tomb and turns her feet towards home, but stops short when she sees a man awkwardly loitering in the shade of a fig tree, eating the fruit.

The tree was not there a moment ago. The man was not there a moment ago. He is not a man.

"No," Maryam says. This time she does pick up a rock. "Not again. Not ever again!" She flings the rock as hard as she can and the angel only just ducks in time, dropping his fig.

He holds out a pale hand. "Um. Be not afraid?"

They always tell her not to be afraid. Once she was a child, and she cringed and covered her face, but Maryam isn’t afraid any more. She doesn’t have anything left to lose.

She picks up another rock and hurls it at him.

Again, he barely ducks in time. "Please don’t do that," the angel says. "I only came to express my condolences and—oh! Would you stop throwing rocks!"

Maryam doesn’t bother to try a third time. She doubts she’d be able to hit him unless he let her.

The angel has a kind face. What a cruel trick to play, what an unkind thing to do to a girl who didn’t know better, and a boy who just wanted people to love one another. He has eyes like clear water on a sunny day, and hair the colour of undyed cloth. He looks soft. Educated. A lover of men. Maryam knows better. He is an ancient and ageless creature. Beneath the sound of his gentle voice, there are a thousand mouths that speak in tongues too holy to hear. She has seen the wheels, and the wings. She has stared into eyes as countless as the stars. She has felt the fire, and heard the singing that rang her head like a bell.

Every unassuming part of him is a lie.

Maryam is nearly forty-six years old. Her feet hurt, and she has a headache from crying. Her hands are pruned from washing her dead son. She is exactly what she seems.

The angel is still talking. "I’m not here to hurt you, you have my word. I just…" He wrings his soft hands. "I’m awfully sorry they sent Gabriel that first time. He’s not a bad sort, although I know he can seem…You mustn’t think we all…"

Maryam interrupts because she thinks the angel will probably talk forever if she doesn’t. "I won’t do it again," she says. Her anger has settled into a sort of calm. She doesn’t raise her voice. "I’ll die first."

The angel looks so terribly sad. "I shouldn’t have come, I intrude on your grief," he says. Then, "If I might offer a blessing?"

Maryam thinks about Crowley—the woman who was not a woman—holding her in her arms as Maryam screamed and howled and tore at her clothing and hair. Crowley was honest in her own bitterness, anger, and despair. She didn’t tell Maryam not to be afraid, or that it would ever make sense.

"It’s not a game we can ever win," Crowley had said. "We can’t even understand it. But we have to play, and we have to keep playing for as long as we’re here, even if the rules change, and the die are loaded. Maybe I had a choice, maybe I didn’t. Maybe you had a choice, and Yeshua had a choice. Maybe not." She wiped tears from Maryam’s face with her thumbs and pressed a kiss to her forehead. "The world is vast, and cold, and dangerous. But there is so much to discover, and to learn: the divine, the profane, and the mundane. And, sometimes, when you are cold and in the dark, someone will light a fire, or shelter you when it rains."

Crowley was as full up with grief as Maryam is, mourning something precious that could never be recovered. She was just as angry with the Almighty, teeth clenched around a scream of her own. But this angel before her now has never known loss and defeat. What could an angel understand of pain?

"No," Maryam says. "I want to give you something, instead."

The angel startles and looks around fretfully. "I’m not sure that’s allowed," he says.

Maryam doesn't care. "I pray that you understand love. And I pray that you know the fear that comes with it: The fear that you could lose it. I pray it _changes you_." Maryam thinks what she’s saying might be a curse. "Maybe then you’ll know how foolish you sound when you tell us not to be afraid, and how arrogant to think you can give me anything of more value than what I had."

Maryam turns her back on the angel and walks towards the rest of her life. She will not see Crowley again, nor will she see another angel. She will never know if her words will come to be. But they will.

There will be a moment, far into the future, when the angel with hair the colour of undyed cloth, and eyes the colour of clear water, will remember her words.

It won’t be on the airbase, facing down the apocalypse, although that will give him the angelic equivalent of indigestion, and his corporeal form will get sweaty hands. In those final moments (before they weren’t final moments) he won’t actually be afraid; not like he should be. He will put his faith in a demon to get him out of this scrape, the same way the demon has always bailed him out of sticky situations.

It will be on a bench, waiting for a bus to Oxford that will be taking an unexpected detour to London along the way. The demon will offer him a place to stay, even though neither of them need to sleep, or eat, or require shelter. And, all of a sudden, the angel will remember Maryam's words and think, "Oh no."

He knows that he loves humanity, rare books, and trying new foods. He loves the unfolding of history, good wine, and sharing that good wine with his friend. He knows—or at least he has finally admitted to himself—that he _has_ a friend. A friend who is a demon, whom he loves.

He will finally understand, on that bus-stop bench, that he is fundamentally different because of his love, and has been for a long time. He will be frightened of many things, but mostly that he'll miss his chance to admit his love out loud where the demon might hear it, and that he will lose his friend forever when their respective sides come for them.

He will understand how foolish his side has been to say, "Be not afraid."

Later, on another bench, hand in hand with the love of his existence, he will think of Maryam again, and her words that might have been a blessing, and might have been a curse. He will wonder how humans do it, going through life knowing it will only ever end one way. Death is inevitable, and all they can do is hope for as much time with the ones they love as they can get.

He has seen how he could run out of time. And he wants more. He wants another six thousand years. He wants six hundred thousand. For the first time he truly understands the human condition in a way he suspects the demon always has.

As they sit on the bench, the demon will predict a new war, and the angel will think, “I don’t care what side I’m on as long as I’m with you; as long as we get more time.”

None of these revelations, to anyone paying attention, are news. But angels are not creatures prone to introspection.

Would the angel, with his endless capacity for willful ignorance and denial, ever have put two and two together without Maryam? Were Maryam’s words part of the Ineffable Plan? Who knows.

Well, the Almighty knows, but they’re not going to tell you. Besides, they just played a card—or perhaps it was a piece moving on the board, or something completely unlike either of those things—and now it’s your turn. You’ll never figure out the rules, or what any of it means. You just have to keep playing.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Words used that are either Hebrew or Latin:**  
>  HaShem — one of the acceptable ways for a Jewish person to verbally refer to god without offending. Literally, ‘the Name’. 
> 
> Caligatus — the lowest rank of Roman soldier. _Caligati_ (plural) literally means “Sandalled men” because of their shoes. Officially called _pedes_ , as in “foot-soldier.” So, no authority, likely to be a standard occupying force, and someone who is Not Prepared to make a decision when a snake-eyed sorceress starts hissing at him.
> 
> Ayin ha’ra — the evil eye
> 
> Shedim — a sort of Jewish demon, more usually considered the embodiment of ailments, but in some versions is a demon in the form of a serpent.
> 
>  **Historical and religious details:**  
>  Title comes from the Hail Mary  
> Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.
> 
> The Sicarii were ~~the Judean People’s Front~~ a splinter group of Jewish separatists who were known for going to Roman gatherings, stabbing a lot of people and then vanishing back into the crowd. They’re considered one of the earliest types of assassin. One theory is that Judas was one of these Sicarii who was initially drawn to Jesus’ radical teachings, but became disillusioned when Jesus was like, “Nah, fam, everyone can be saved, even gentiles. Even the Romans.” Which led to the betrayal.
> 
> An abaya is the item of clothing that Crowley is wearing in the crucifixion scene and is one of the ways you can tell Crowley is female presenting in that time. Crowley also wears a shayla, a loose scarf that is usually worn over the hair for modesty and not to hide one's snake eyes.
> 
> Crucifixion could take up to twenty hours and death is by asphyxia. When hanging from your arms like that, it’s impossible to exhale and you’re suffocated by your own body weight. The really nasty thing about crucifixion is that the feet are nailed/tied so the victim can pull themselves up enough to breathe. It would be excruciating, but doable. The stronger you were, the longer you could live. According to the gospels, Jesus died after about six hours.
> 
> Breaking the legs of a crucified person meant that they would not be able to lift themselves up anymore and so they would immediately begin to suffocate. Basically Crowley is shortening the amount of time the other two men being crucified would suffer.
> 
> The words Mary thinks of “For You formed my inward parts” etc. are from Psalm 139.
> 
> In the book of Mathew, Joseph of Arimathea, and Nicodemus get permission to remove Jesus' body from the cross. They are the ones to prepare his body and entomb him. In the book of Good Omens, the Earth is a Libra, so I decided I do what I want.
> 
> According to Genesis, Eve's eldest son killed her second son, and that was the first murder, and the first death. There is no mention in Genesis about how Eve felt about any of it.
> 
> The summary is from Hebrews 13:2 — _And do not forget kindness to strangers, for by this, some who, while they were unaware, have entertained angels_ — and is also the reason I had Mary keep describing Crowley as a stranger. (Also Crowley is strange af.)


End file.
